Animal Compassion
While it may be tempting to use terms like “compassionate” or “empathetic” to describe the humpback whale who had saved Nan, Nan chooses her words carefully.
She avoids using human language to describe the whale’s conduct, instead referring to it as “altruistic.”
There is a distinction between compassion and altruism, and while compassion is a human feeling that can be debated whether it exists in non-human creatures, altruism has been thoroughly documented in numerous species and has several socio-biological causes.
